During my 2014 campaign, I was able to talk personally with many Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans. After a town hall one night, a distressed vet missing one of his legs asked me to accompany him outside for a private conversation. Through his tears, he told me about his PTSD, his loneliness and separation from his family, and his undiminished patriotism. I was struck silent, sharing his tears when he came to his main point: He did not know why we fought those wars.
This veteran and his pain tipped the balance in my decision to challenge an incumbent in my own party and run for U.S. Senate this year.
Since the Berlin Wall fell, under the Clinton administration and continuing under both Democrat and Republican administrations, we downgraded our prior strategy focused on defense against enemies posing existential threats. We engaged our superlative military in nation-building interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and – in this decade – Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria and now Yemen. Each of these interventions has almost entirely failed to yield the intended stability, ideological tolerance or prosperity.
In 2011, ignoring unambiguous public warning from then-Defense Secretary Gates, Hillary Clinton and Kelly Ayotte pushed to bomb Libya. As predicted, Libya is now in its fifth year of deadly civil war and has become an ISIS beachhead.
In 2012, again despite prior warning from military leaders, Clinton and Ayotte backed arming, funding, and training “moderate” rebels who morphed, almost exactly as predicted, into the ISIS caliphate.
The U.S. has now committed ground, air and sea forces in support for the Saudi war in Yemen, unintentionally making al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula stronger than at any time in its two-decade history. These failed nation-building wars have spread terrorism, chaos and human suffering throughout the Middle East, created tens of millions of refugees and made America less safe.
These ongoing wars seriously violate Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants only Congress the power to declare war. The most recent such declaration in 2001 granted the president authority to attack “nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” A new declaration of war would force Congress to engage the public in debate over objectives and a plan to win and exit. Our soldiers deserve no less.
It is time to end this succession of failed nation-building wars and adopt a national security strategy generally dubbed “realism.” Realism recognizes the near-immutability of tribalism, the complexity of regional power balances, means of influence other than war, and the value of American prudence and restraint.
A suffocate and quarantine strategy would be far more effective in protecting Americans from terrorists than whack-a-mole interventionism, which has caused terrorists to metastasize to other regions or go underground and wait out occupation.
The United States must use our full diplomatic, economic and cultural powers to compel our back-stabbing allies, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to stop funding terrorists and Wahhabi terror ideology. Let the truth out and publish the 28 redacted pages of the
9/11 report, which cites “incontrovertible evidence” from the CIA that members of the Saudi government funded and supported some of the terrorists who murdered nearly 3,000 Americans.
Quarantine means having secure American borders and far tighter immigration policies to keep the bad guys out. Kelly Ayotte made Americans less safe when she broke her 2010 campaign promise and voted for the Gang of 8 amnesty/open borders bill. The Border Patrol now releases into the U.S. 80 percent of illegals apprehended at the Mexican border. The opioids that killed 300 New Hampshire residents last year were snuck across this open border. Rather than dragnet domestic spying, which violates our constitutional liberties and does almost nothing to keep us safe, we should be vigilant within our own communities and report suspicious activity to law enforcement.
America must nonetheless continue to have the world’s strongest and most technologically advanced military. But history has shown that a debt-ridden government results in a weaker military. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen has repeatedly warned that the “single biggest threat to our national security is our debt.”
Kelly Ayotte was disastrously wrong in abandoning her promise to be a fiscal conservative. She voted for the pork-stuffed, lobbyist-written CRomnibus and omnibus budget bills, which added $1.5 trillion to our national debt in just the past 18 months.
A return to fiscal responsibility and foreign policy realism will of necessity impact weapons acquisition, force readiness and deployment, and our soldiers and veterans. Fiscal responsibility means ending rampant procurement pork in military budgets. Congress routinely robs readiness (training and maintenance), for which there are few lobbyists and campaign money sources, to pay for grossly overpriced and technologically over-complicated weapons systems, for which there are many lobbyists and much campaign money bribery. These contractors routinely and purposefully lowball initial cost estimates. The GAO found that, for 78 procurement programs examined in 2014, final costs were 46 percent over budget.
Congress’s habitual pork-barrel spending is enabled by a lax military budgeting culture that would not survive a single day in the private sector. The Department of Defense has failed to produce an auditable budget for 25 straight years.
Case in point: Kelly Ayotte’s May 13 Senate Armed Services Committee vote for the 2017 defense budget, which included $10.5 billion for 63 F-35 fighter jets. The F-35 is a catastrophic failure, outmatched in each of 17 dogfights with the older F-16 it is supposed to replace and in simulations with Chinese fighter jets. The hyper-complex F-35 requires 30 million lines of computer code, which must be customized before each mission. Pilots must be individually fitted with a custom $600,000 helmet without which the fighter cannot be landed.
With a lifetime program cost now ballooned to $1.4 trillion, the primary mission of the F-35 is to lavish taxpayer money on defense contractors. The cost-saving approach that will better guarantee U.S. air superiority is to kill the F-35 program and to upgrade existing F-15, F-16, F-18 and A-10 aircraft.
In her cheerleading for Hillary Clinton’s failed wars, and her votes for open borders, crushing national debt and military procurement pork, Kelly Ayotte has made America less safe. Instead, we can show greatest respect for our soldiers and veterans by adopting a prudent, effective and fiscally responsible national security strategy. In the September primary, I offer voters this choice.
(Jim Rubens lives with his family in Hanover and is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Learn more at JimRubens.com.)